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Monday, November 18, 2013

As a kid, my earliest understanding of Count Dracula came
from The Monster Squad (1987), Count Chocula, Sesame Street, and a mythical final boss I could never get to in
the Nintendo game Castlevania 2: Simon’s
Quest. None of which was the proper way to get to know The Count, of course.
And so, I remained ignorant of the real legend of Count Dracula until fairly
recently when I was instilled with a desire to read Bram Stoker’sDracula (1897),
following a pleasurably short read from Joseph
Sheridan Le Fanu’sCarmilla (1872).
Thanks to Stoker’s novel, I’ve been
on quite the Dracula kick lately, watching a lot of films based on the novel,
such as Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror
(1922), Dracula (1931), Horror of Dracula (1958), Count Dracula (1970), Nosferatu: The Vampyre (1979), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), and Dracula 3D (2012).

I really think we
would’ve had a near-perfect adaptation with Francis
Ford Coppola’s version from 1992, if it weren’t for the love story between
Dracula and Mina thrown in, and I don’t think Lucy was supposed to seem so
promiscuous, either. I’m actually not offended by a soft Dracula that could
genuinely fall in love with a living woman without wishing her any harm; just
don’t shoehorn it into an adaptation of Stoker’s
novel. A lot of people who haven’t read the book will probably think it was a
romance novel. I actually thought it was an interesting idea in Count Dracula’s Great Love (1974),
where Paul Naschy created and
portrayed, for the first time, Count Dracula as a romantic softie.